


You Were

by peacefrog



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-14
Updated: 2014-09-14
Packaged: 2018-02-17 08:13:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2302724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacefrog/pseuds/peacefrog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You were four years old when you carried your baby brother out of your burning childhood home. Your tiny arms weren’t big enough to carry the both of you, so you left yourself behind in the fire. Abandoned, crying out, you didn’t look back to see the last remaining parts of yourself go up in flames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Were

You were four years old when you carried your baby brother out of your burning childhood home. Your tiny arms weren’t big enough to carry the both of you, so you left yourself behind in the fire. Abandoned, crying out, you didn’t look back to see the last remaining parts of yourself go up in flames.

By the time you were nine you had a shotgun in your soft little hands. You’d go to school smelling of gunpowder and spoiled milk and it was like you had disappeared. You felt like the old machete dad kept beneath his pillow, sharp and rusted around the edges. Poised and ready to strike. Sir, yes sir, he’s safe, and remember that’s all that matters.

You were twelve when your brother found out that the monster in his closet was real. You were so afraid you wouldn’t be able to protect him after that, and you made your body into a life raft. You drowned trying to shelter him, but he was alive and your lifeless limbs kept him afloat.

You were sixteen when you fell half in love with the idea of a girl. She tasted like cherry lip balm and she was the first gentle thing you had known since you lost your mother in the fire. She felt like a resurrection, but you lost her in the storm and her name on your lips still tastes bitter, like home and longing and someone else’s memory.

By the time you were twenty you were numb, but you had learned how to fake a smile so well you almost believed it when you saw yourself reflected in a window, or a dirty motel bathroom mirror. You had learned many things in the sixteen years since you lost your mother, the most important of which being that you always come last, and that’s just the way it had to be.

You were twenty-three when your brother left for college, and your dad was a sloppy drunken mess for two weeks straight, reminding you every night that you had one simple job, and you failed at it. Your body was a loaded gun, your heart backfiring in your chest. You were on the outside looking in, watching fragments of yourself scatter like leaves.

You were twenty-seven when your father died, and as he went up in flames you knew it should have been your body on the pyre. You felt connected to the fire, fated, for you had lost yourself to flames already so many years ago. It was like there was nothing left of you, but somehow you just kept going.

You were twenty-nine when you went to Hell. Forty years later an angel pieced you back together. Back on Earth only four months had gone by but your weary bones felt every second of the decades spent engulfed in sulfur and hellfire. You couldn’t drink away the memories, and it took you a very long time to understand why he pulled you out to begin with.

You were thirty when you watched your brother turn into half a monster, little bits of your already fragmented heart lodging themselves into every part of you and every waking second felt like drowning. The angel that saved your soul gave his life for you that same year, the first in a long line of sacrifices this immortal being would make on your behalf. He was magnificent, radiating starlight with the force of a thousand suns churning behind his eyes and it would take you several years still to understand the magnitude of what he was giving up.

Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four…you can’t remember when you realized you were in love, but it happened all the same. This angel, this being, he was so beyond your understanding, but little bits of him seeped beneath your skin and you were bound to him in the most inexplicable way.

You were thirty-five when three things happened. You realized he would never love you back. Your brother pushed you away. Then you turned into a monster. A wild, feral beast, something had snapped inside. You could blame it on the curse, but truth is it had been happening for more than thirty years. You were surprised it had taken this long. You had subtle glimpses of it in Hell, but you were speeding toward it now at a million miles a second and when you crashed, blade straight through your heart, it felt something like relief.

You were thirty-five when your soul was twisted black. A snarling, howling monster, you could no longer remember what it even felt like to live with the weight of the world suffocating you. It was like you had found the answer, the cure, the way. Your wretched soul was like divine light and sanity. The black smoke inside, your mark, your blade, they became your family. It had taken far too long, but finally you were free.


End file.
